Posts Tagged ‘twitter’

Over the last few years there’s been quite a few interesting (or boring, depending on your patience) debates about the plagiarism of jokes on Twitter and Facebook.

On one hand, you can argue that no-one really “owns” a joke. Jokes have always belonged to the people. People tell each other jokes and change and embellish and improve them as they go along. In the case of 99% of jokes people have no idea who originally came up with them, and quite rightly they don’t really care. When a man tells a friend a joke in the pub he doesn’t pause, explain the origin of the joke and make sure that whoever first thought of it is credited. And at the end of the day it’s only a joke; it’s not someone drunkenly screaming state secrets in a crowded pub.

On the other hand, on Facebook and Twitter, jokes are a form of currency. On Twitter in particular, where the one-liner is king and where a good, short joke can get thousands of retweets and hundreds of new followers, it’s very frustrating when people steal your joke and pass it off as your own. I’m not talking about people coming up with the same joke at the same time as you (which happens constantly, particularly in reference to news stories) or repeating a joke that they’ve known for years where the tweeter has no way of knowing who originally wrote it. I’m talking about people deliberately stealing your work and passing it off as their own.

As a writer who has been clogging up The Internet for well over a decade, it’s curious to see what has happened to some of the things I’ve written. In 2002 I started a page on my website called Sad Jokes. The idea was to take the traditional format of jokes, such as a Knock Knock joke or a Doctor joke but give the joke a logical, cold, depressing punchline. For example:

Man: Doctor, I’ve broken my leg.

Doctor: I’m afraid it is a very bad break. You will never walk again.

I can’t pretend that I’m the first writer to try to subvert jokes or take established comedy tropes and turn them on their head; but at the time I felt like I was the first person making this specific type of “sad joke”. Who knows, maybe Kafka or Bernie Winters beat me to it?

I enjoyed writing the jokes and added more over the following months. When I wrote my first novel in 2006, I included some of the jokes within it.

Here’s a photo of my book! With the jokes in it!

And of course, the inevitable compliment soon followed, in that I started seeing the jokes appearing (uncredited) on various websites and forums. In 2007 they appeared on the notorious Sickipedia website as German Jokes with a few additional jokes that were nothing to do with me. I didn’t really care. People were enjoying the jokes and no one was pretending that they had written the jokes themselves.

To be honest, as with most stuff on my now-generally-defunct website, I forgot about the Sad Jokes. Until a couple of weeks ago I noticed an account on Twitter called Anti-Joke Cat. It’s a popular account with over 170,000 followers. The jokes within were essentially the same format as my sad jokes. So what. That didn’t bother me – you can’t copyright a format. But then I noticed that some of the jokes were very similar indeed to the jokes on my website. For example:

And that annoyed me. Since I’m currently taking a break from Twitter and I noticed that Anti-Joke Cat also has a Facebook page, I left the cat a comment on Facebook noting that his joke was clearly “inspired” by my own jokes, and left a link back to Sad Jokes. I didn’t expect a reply. I didn’t get one. But I checked Twitter a few days later and saw that whoever is behind Anti-Joke Cat had clearly seen my link to Sad Jokes. Because they’d visited the page and nicked a joke of mine from there. Word for word.

What’s doubly annoying about this is that at the bottom of my Sad Jokes page is a link to my Twitter account, so the Anti-Joke Cat could easily have credited me for the joke but deliberately chose to pass it off as their own joke.

I have no idea who is behind the Anti-Joke Cat twitter account. I doubt they see what they are doing as malicious or wrong in any way – and they are probably right. They’re tweeting fairly harmless jokes. I doubt they make any money out of the account and probably just enjoy the dubious ego-massaging pleasure of having a very popular Twitter account.

If you think I’m making a fuss about nothing, you’re probably right. It’s not Watergate; it’s just someone nicking my jokes and passing them off as his own. And as I wrote at the beginning, people have been swapping jokes since before the pyramids were built. In the great scheme of things, it means nothing. In the less-than-great scheme of my life, it doesn’t mean very much. The people who enjoy Anti-Joke cat’s account and retweet him/her certainly don’t care where the jokes come from, and this whole blog post feels like a man joylessly stamping on someone else’s fun (my favourite hobby).

The irony, I suppose, is that whilst I love writing jokes and I like making people laugh, I tend to take life very seriously. When it comes to my ego, I have almost no sense of humour. I struggle to laugh when I feel wronged or slighted and generally get bitter when I see people succeeding unfairly. Even if it’s a fucking unfunny cat. I don’t expect the cat to be unmasked and then marched into Twitter jail for 25 years of hard labour. In fact, I don’t expect anything to happen. Still, it’s good to write an irate blogpost from time to time – if I am annoyed at anything, it’s less a plagiaristic cat and more the fact that it’s nigh on impossible to create a viable career out of words written on the Internet. And I can’t directly blame a cat for that.

Underlying all this is a debate about jokes and the Internet and who owns words anyway in a digital age. And it’s a debate I’ll leave to people with more brains and energy than I’ve got. It’s late and I’m getting angry about a cat nicking my jokes. It’s probably time for bed.

UPDATE!

Well, the unsightly minions of Twitter have been hard at work declaring war on Anti-Joke Cat, which has elicited a reply from Mr Anti-Joke Cat himself, in the form of a series of DMs to me. Here’s what he has to say:

“Hello, Sir. Firstly, I would like to say that the first time I’ve heard of you was this morning. Secondly, I regularly check what people are saying about me and DM my followers quite often. Whilst looking through these tweets, I saw a few people mention you and this alleged plagiarism. I read through your blog post and I understand fully the frustration you feel, as tweets regularly get “stolen” from me on my personal account. I am one of many anti-joke accounts on Twitter and I would like to draw your attention to @AntiJokeApple and @AntiJokeJamal, both who have a larger following than me. I created a couple of my own anti-jokes for this page (all of which these two accounts copied), but the rest of them came from my only source anti-joke.com. Now, as I understand it, people post their own’ anti-jokes to this page, a bit like Sickipedia. There are several variations of the same anti-joke and looking at your Sad Jokes page, many I have seen before, even if they differ slightly. I don’t know if someone has taken your jokes and posted them on this anti-joke website or it is merely coincidence, but I did not take them directly from your website. Also, it was only the one joke that was word for word and that was potentially yours. But as I said, they’re all on anti-joke.com. I hope this has relieved some of your hate towards me, I am just an 18 year old boy doing something rather unproductive with his spare time. Regards, Anti-Joke Cat.”

To which I replied, also by DM:

“Hello there. I certainly don’t hate you. I don’t even dislike you. I’m just annoyed that my jokes are appearing uncredited on your Twitter. I appreciate that you’re only 18 and you’re just doing this for fun. I’m now aware that there are lots of other anti-joke Twitter accounts. And I understand that most of those anti-joke Twitter accounts just take material from the anti-joke website and use it. However, you have to take responsibility for the jokes that appear on your Twitter feed. Saying “I took them from another website” isn’t really a good response. You got yourself over 170,000 followers by posting other people’s jokes. That’s not a great thing to do. A lot of people will assume you write those jokes yourself or that at the very least your followers submit them to you. It seems to me that unless you wrote the joke yourself or know for sure who wrote it (and credit them) then you probably shouldn’t put the joke on your Twitter. Because the likelihood is that you’re ripping someone off, and that isn’t a nice thing to do.”

So, the upshot of it is that as I suspected, Anti-Joke Cat isn’t a criminal mastermind, he’s an 18-year-old guy with too much time on his hands. However, he’s not totally harmless. He’s an 18-year-old who has accrued 170,000 followers on Twitter by taking jokes from a website (anti-jokes.com) and passing them off as his own. My own feeling is that he should stop using other the jokes from anti-jokes.com because the likelihood is that most of the decent jokes on that website have been stolen from professional comedians or other people’s Twitter accounts. It’s interesting to note that Anti-jokes.com hosts banner ads, so they’re happy to have make money off the jokes, and they are also selling an anti-joke book (which I suspect contains at least a handful of jokes that I’ve personally written).

On a personal level it’s odd to think that the jokes I wrote 10 years ago now appears in a mutated form across The Internet and seem to have generated hundreds of thousands of followers for the Twitter accounts that deliver jokes to the public. And on a wider level, it’s interesting to see how quickly a joke can be divorced from its original author and claimed as a kind of public domain material that anyone can use. I suppose that as soon as my jokes appeared uncredited on Sickipedia back in 2007, the cat was out of the bag. People were inevitably going to spread the jokes and no one would give a damn about who originally wrote them. And I don’t blame people for that. Let’s compare jokes with recipes. If I find a good recipe online, it’s rarely credited to anyone, and if I share it with friends, I don’t do an exhaustive search to find out who originally wrote the recipe. I just share it. (Although if I were to set up a dedicated recipe Twitter account, I would probably make some attempt to find out who originally wrote the recipes rather than passing them off as my own). Still, unless you’re a professional writer or comedian, no one really cares or minds who originally wrote a joke. Most of my favourite jokes are old Jewish jokes that have been told a thousand times by a thousand different people.

In terms of the Anti-Joke Cat, I feel silly making a fuss about something as minor as stolen one-liners, but at the same time I know people on Twitter who would sell their mum into slavery for 170,000 followers, and he’s managed to get an awful lot of followers and influence by a) lifting jokes straight from the anti-joke website b) turning a blind eye towards the fact lots of those jokes are stolen from other people and c) not making it clear that he hasn’t written the jokes himself. I hope he has a think about what he is doing.

UPDATE 2:

Well, I’ve had further communication with Mr Cat. Here’s some more DMs from him.

“Hello, again. I have now read your blog update. Believe me, I never in a million years expected it to get this big. I remember being excited one day in college when it hit 6,000 followers. I don’t even have an excuse for what is essentially plagiarism, all I can say is, “Welcome to the internet of today.” There are all sorts of quotes/jokes accounts on Twitter, all of them copying jokes from various websites, mobile phone applications and other people. One notable example, @sickipediabot (Not affiliated with Sickipedia, has gained over 500,000 followers by simply posting a selection of jokes from Sickipedia, none of them accredited to the people who posted them to, or to the original authors. And like you stated in your post, it’s very unlikely they even know who the original authors are. There are several accounts with over 1,000,000 followers on here, all posting unaccredited jokes and quotes purely for RTs. I am just one tiny little fish in an ocean of plagiarism. I do disagree that a lot of people would think I write these, even though I have written a few. I feel that I am unfairly being singled out when there are hundreds of others with even more followers doing exactly the same. Mind, they probably wouldn’t have even replied to you the first time. And even people with fewer followers do it. You see a joke on Sickipedia, and within an hour or so, that same joke is all over Twitter, with them effectively taking credit for it. I think most people know it isn’t their own jokes though, and dismiss it. The rule seems to be that if you aren’t a professional comedian, it doesn’t really matter. The chances are, if you try to come up with something original yourself, someone, somewhere has already thought of it. You seem like a genuinely lovely fellow and I’m sorry if this has caused you some frustration.”

Not mollified by his flattery, I wrote a slightly pompous reply:

“I don’t think you are being unfairly singled out. You are being singled out because I found my joke on YOUR account. Not someone else’s. I’m aware that there are plenty of other accounts doing similar things, but it just happened that I found my joke on your site. Your argument seems to be “a lot of other people do it, so why shouldn’t I?” which is quite a weak argument, to say the least. As for the idea that if you come up with something original, it’s most likely already been done before… sorry but no. There’s a difference between being inspired by other writers and simply stealing their work. Amazingly, as a writer I do sometimes come up with ideas or jokes that no one has done before, which is what makes it very frustrating when someone steals my work and passes it off as their own. My suggestion would be that you try doing something useful. Try writing something for yourself. Try building something you can be proud of. Try coming up with a clever, original idea. And if you can’t think of something clever, original and unique, come up with a better excuse for ripping people off than “Everyone else is doing it.” You are not everyone else. Take responsibility for what appears on your Twitter.”

To which Mr Cat replied:

“I originally got the idea from the ‘Anti-Joke Chicken’ meme. I suggest you have a look at it. It’s completely normal nowadays for these memes to be turned into Twitter accounts. I know it’s frustrating when you think someone has stolen your work, but that was not the case. I think of Anti-joke as a resource and don’t think I am doing anything wrong. Therefore, I shall be continuing with what I am doing. If I had bought their book which they sell for $9.99, and wrote ‘All jokes taken from the Anti-Joke book’ in my bio, would it be acceptable then? Under your views, it should be, as long as I credit the author/s of the book and even though they didn’t originally create the jokes.”

And I chipped in with:

“Of course you’re going to continue what you’re doing. You get lots of attention whilst making almost no effort. That’s your choice. But please don’t say you haven’t stolen my material when my joke appears word-for-word on your Twitter account. There’s nothing I can do to stop you taking other people’s material and I doubt you’re going to stop. You seem to think it’s acceptable. You could at least have the decency to delete tweets that you KNOW are taken from other people, but you don’t seem to care how or why the tweets appear on the anti-joke site, as long as the retweets keep flowing for you. That’s your choice.”

It’s exciting doing battle with a cat.

AMAZING UPDATE 3:

I then asked Mr Cat why he runs the account:

“I’m slightly irritated but more than that I’m puzzled. I’m puzzled as to why you run the account in the first place, especially since, as you have said, you know how frustrating and irritating it is when someone steals your jokes. And you’ve already stated that there are lots of other accounts doing exactly the same thing.”

He replied, purring:

“As I’ve already said, I never expected it to get this big. But I was simply trying to make a Twitter account for the Anti-Joke Chicken meme. However, all of the desirable @ names were taken and thus, Anti-Joke Cat was born. I don’t know who creates the jokes I use. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t think they ‘belong’ to anyone. It’s not like they’re copyrighted.”

I countered:

“In my case, the joke is copyrighted. It appears in my book, published in Britain in 2006. My main argument with tweets is that I don’t mind someone using a tweet of mine as long as they credit me for it. In the case of the Anti-Joke website, they seem to go out of their way to remove credit from the jokes. They do this so that they can then claim they “own” the joke, so they can then sell books full of the jokes and sell advertising space on their website. You may or may not make money out of your Twitter feed (170,000 followers will be very tempting to some advertisers) but you’re happy to use the jokes from the website, despite knowing that most of them rip off other people.”

He meowed in reply:

“I may have made the odd ‘quick buck’ from it, but that’s all. I don’t like doing sponsored tweets because I know how much they annoy my followers. I think you’ve rounded it up very nicely in your blog post and it’s now time to put this rather silly issue to bed.”

Rather exhausted by his “I-know-this-is-wrong-but-I’m-going-to-do-it-anyway attitude” I felt I had to make one small point before I unfollowed him.

“It’s not the most important issue in the world, but it’s not silly. It’s about plagiarism. But you’re not going to stop and that’s it.”

So Mr Anti-Cat has now deleted the tweet that copies mine word-for-word, but has said that he’s going to continue tweeting jokes he finds on Anti-Joke.com, despite knowing that they are mostly stolen from other people, because he likes doing it. Fair enough.

Of course, during the course of the day I’ve found myself slightly irritated by the attitude of Mr Anti-Joke Cat, but I still maintain that it’s hardly the most important issue in the world. It’s a tiny mote of irritation in my eye. In some ways what’s interesting to me is that someone can build such a huge following on Twitter simply by copying and pasting jokes from a website, without doing anything creative or writing their own material. I think as much as anything else, my encounters with the Anti-Joke Cat illustrates a certain generation gap. I’m 37 years old. I grew up in a largely pre-Internet age, where text (whether it be a joke, a recipe or a short story) did not change hands quite as freely as it does now. It was an age when publishing something involved putting it in a newspaper or book or magazine, and those publishers would then have to take responsibility for what they wrote and couldn’t easily publish someone else’s work as their own. I assume, perhaps naively, that when you write something, whether it is on The Internet or in a book, that it belongs to you. Whereas Mr Anti-Joke Cat is 18 and has probably never experienced a time when the Internet wasn’t there. He has grown up in an age where if you like a piece of text, you copy it and bung it on Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr and soon it belongs to everyone. He’s young and I’m older. I could get angry about his attitude, but I suspect I’d be an old man shouting at the sea.

As a nice postscript to this blog post, here’s a joke posted on the Anti-Joke Cat twitter feed an hour ago, after we had finished DMing each other and nice Mr Cat had agreed to delete the tweet that was copied word-for-word from me:

I have spent much of the last few months live tweeting Masterchef. This basically involves me watching a TV programme and writing a series of stupid comments. It has helped to pass the long winter evenings.

I like Masterchef. In culinary terms, it’s very much comfort food. It’s stodgy, predictable, formulaic and very enjoyable. It eschews the worst aspects of reality TV; the need to vilify ordinary people or dwell unnecessarily on mawkish backstories. Of course it’s personality-driven, but the touch is light and the focus remains as much on food as on the “journey”. It’s TV that is forgotten almost as soon as it is over, but that is no bad thing. I don’t want to lie awake at night thinking of burnt Thai fishcakes.

I don’t tweet every series of Masterchef – I only do it when I feel like it. I’m not paid to do it, so if it feels like an obligation rather than a pleasure then I don’t bother. I first started a few years ago, by accident. The show was on and I found myself tweeting about it, and realised that I enjoyed both the show and Twitter more that way. Fortunately my followers seem to agree and over the years I haven’t alienated too many followers by bombarding them with 80 tweets an hour that make absolutely no sense unless you are watching the same TV show as me.

My approach to Masterchef is to focus less on what is happening onscreen -because as I’ve said, it’s often very formulaic – and tweet my own imaginary version of events, bringing in time travel, murder, philosophy and writing my own dialogue. In doing so, I turn the contestants into caricatures. In my version of the show, the presenters, chefs and mentors are villains, heroes, sex objects, murderers, clowns and idiot savants. They are my comedy playthings and I use them as I will. In reality I know that Shelina isn’t a sex object, that Andrew isn’t a sentient field mouse and that Tom isn’t a dead-eyed psychopath.

My tweeting of Masterchef is a good example of how Twitter (or my experience of it) has changed. When I first started tweeting it, I had 1000 followers and none of the participants (other than early adopter Gregg Wallace) were on Twitter. I could tweet what I liked in the knowledge that it never got back to those involved – it was the equivalent of me sitting around in private with a group of friends, all of us watching together. But Twitter is now a part of mainstream culture, and both the presenters and half the contestants are on Twitter. When I tweet something silly or rude about one of them, it’s not uncommon that someone will retweet it and copy them in, meaning that they get to read what I am saying about them. I have no real problem with this as what I’m writing is so obviously cartoonish that I doubt it could cause any real offence. Even so, I worry about some of the tweets being taken out of context. A retweet pulls a tweet out of its natural context and places it into an environment in which it is easily misunderstood.

Still, I can’t have been too rude because I am now followed on Twitter by John Torode, one of the Masterchef presenters. This has probably softened my attitude somewhat. Nothing blunts the edge of satire like being accepted. It’s also changed my attitude in terms of how rude or cruel I am. As I’ve said, my humour tends to be cartoonish and I steer clear of direct insults, but the fact that the objects of my derision are now on Twitter is a good reminder that these are real people, with real feelings, and that there’s no excuse for being an absolute prick about them. Knowing that the contestants might well read what I am writing makes me consider what I put on Twitter and whether I want to take lazy potshots about someone’s face/hair/accent. When I see some of the hatred and vitriol heaped that is directed towards “public figures” on Twitter, it does make me question myself. Obviously, if you’re appearing regularly on TV you can expect some flack, but the levels of bile directed at some reality TV stars is horrible. They’re just people on TV. They aren’t murderers (note: I have no proof of this. Some of them may be murderers)

No mention of Masterchef can be complete without writing about the show’s lynchpin: garrulous fruit and veg man Gregg Wallace. When I first started watching Masterchef, I didn’t think much of Gregg. He was a comedy bald man, with dubious foodie qualifications, shouting a lot. But over the course of many series of Masterchef and Celebrity Masterchef and Masterchef: The Professionals, I’ve come to understand his role. He’s not there to be an expert in the traditional sense – that is why he is paired with a proper chef. He’s there as someone who knows a bit about food but is essentially an everyman and a cheerleader, there to revel in the food, dispense words of advice and occasionally utter a catchphrase. And he does it well. Many of my tweets focus on Gregg, because he’s the most obviously cartoonish person in the show, mugging up for the camera, spoon plunged deep in his mouth, eyes bulging in epicurean delight. In my parallel comedy universe Gregg is the deluded sun king, overseeing his court of follies. Of course, the reality is quite different. For the purposes of Masterchef I’ve started following him on Twitter and it turns out that he’s a normal person with the same concerns and vanities and self-awareness of anyone else. He seems to know that he’s seen as something of a loveable buffoon and accepts it as part and parcel of his job. I don’t know if I could ever be quite so relaxed about my public image, which is why I doubt I’ll ever have a career in TV.

Anyway, tonight is the final of this year’s series of Masterchef. I won’t be tweeting it as I have a prior engagement. I hope and expect Shelina to win, but I’m not too bothered anyway. My world of Masterchef isn’t really about who wins, it’s about using it as a starting point for my own imaginary ramblings. And in my imagination, I already know who the winner is.

My Masterchef tweets are all archived here. Looking back at them without the show playing at the same time, they make quite terrifying reading.

EDIT: It turns out that just before the final of Masterchef, The Times did a live webchat with the finalists in which they were asked if they read my tweets. It turns out they do. How odd. How lovely, and scary and odd.

A few years ago, when I was on a London bus, I decided to tweet: “I am on a bus.” It struck me as a wonderfully banal thing to tweet, and it nicely dovetailed with my earlier Twitter catchphrase: “I am in a room” (which I tweet when I am in a room). It caught on. A couple of weeks later, I thought I’d spice things up by tweeting Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, every time I got a bus. Over the last two years I’ve tweeted Boris many hundreds of times, reporting on my bus journeys. I’m sure he appreciates it, despite the fact that he has never replied.

Because of this, people associate me with buses. They think of me as The King of Buses. Random strangers tweet me when they are on the bus! They seem to think that I spend most of my life on buses. This is not the case.

Some people on a bus.

I feel I should explain why I tweet so much from buses. First of all, I work from home a lot. This means that unlike many Londoners, I don’t face a daily commute via tube. The bus is great for short journeys, but if you’ve got a long trip from the suburbs into the City or the West End, you’re much more likely to take the tube. Personally, if I am out and about during the day, I’m probably on a bus.

Secondly, For at least half of the last three years I lived in Muswell Hill, which has no tube station but an excellent array of buses – if I wanted to take the tube, I’d have to take the bus first. I moved from the leafy confines of N10, but I still live in quite a hilly area and since I’m quite lazy I take a lot of short, local bus journeys – I’d probably be a lot fitter and healthier if I walked instead. Even given all that, I probably only use the bus 10-15 times a week. There are many Londoners whose baseline is 10 journeys a week, since they will get the bus to-and-from work or a tube station five days a week. Ands there are plenty of people who takes four buses a day – two to work and two home. Compared to them I’m a dilettante; the difference being that they don’t tweet about it.

The thing that frustrates me about my public association with buses is that I don’t actually like buses. I appreciate that they exist and I know that London buses are much, much more reliable than they were when I was a kid, but I have no love for buses. I know some people find buses terribly romantic, but I see them as purely functional. They get me from A to B and that’s it.

In contrast, I absolutely love almost everything about the London Underground. I swoon about it. I love tube maps and tube tales and tube station design. It excites me. I’ve always felt like that. If London has a soul it’s located underground, shuttling along the Piccadilly or Victoria Line. There’s a relentless energy about the tube, a sense of expectation and drama with every journey. Even if it’s a humdrum journey from Finsbury Park to Turnpike Lane, it feels epic, as though simply by being in a tube train you are connected to the pulsing heart of the city. I love people-watching on the tube. I love the station designs. I love the endless romance of anonymity, the glances exchanged across platforms and escalators.

I also like the rules and etiquette of the tube: as a rule, people behave themselves when underground. Trapped underground, closely monitored and with limited exits, people think twice before attacking or abusing you. There is a certain dusty, disheveled chivalry on the Underground. This is in stark contrast to buses, where ruffians know they can get off whenever they want (pressing the button above the doors) and therefore act out whatever gangster fantasies they desire. No amount of commuters at rush hour is as terrifying as accidentally getting on a bus as the schools are emptying.

Of course, I’m also realistic about the tube. It is crippled by signal failures and draconian weekend closures. I’m also lucky enough to avoid often use the tube in rush hour – I know how hellish it can be. I also once spent 20 very hungover minutes stuck on a Circle Line train between Moorgate and Barbican, desperately needing the loo and cursing my existence. Despite all this, I love the London Underground. Sometimes, when I’m feeling depressed or out-of-sorts I take a short tube journey to reset my brain.

Some people waiting for a tube train.

I would tweet more often when I’m on the tube, except for the obvious fact that most of the time I am underground with no signal. Otherwise I’d be tweeting “I am on a tube”, happy for the whole world to retweet me.

Over the last few days, the writer/TV presenter/hair model Charlie Brooker has been tweeting about David Cameron. More specifically he’s been tweeting about David Cameron being a giant evil lizard who eats foals. It’s moderately amusing (I imagine that when Charlie Brooker wakes up in the morning, there’s a Guardian reader at the end of the bed telling him he’s not as funny as he used to be) but what has been interesting is the response from his followers. Because Charlie has been retweeting all the angry responses (removing the tweeter’s name to both protect them from abuse and to prevent trolls getting their 15 seconds in the limelight).

A lot of these tweets have been along the lines of “You’re a boring twat. Change the record.” or “If you continue like this I will unfollow you.”

Now, my attitude to Twitter is that if someone is boring or pompous or just plain rubbish, I unfollow them. I don’t tweet them to tell them that they are shit. I don’t engage them in arguments about why they are boring/pompous/wrong because I have chosen to follow them. It was my decision. They are not obliged to entertain me. They haven’t lured me into following them under false pretences. I am not paying them to tweet me.

I find it interesting, because I think it reflects how we view our Twitter feeds. Many of us think of our twitter feeds as our own personal space. And when we follow someone, we feel that we are inviting them into our personal space, and that as guests there, they should behave or we can angrily throw them out. Now, my own personal space on Twitter is quite relaxed. I work from home most of the time. I don’t care if people I follow swear or post rude pictures. I only unfollow people if they really bore/annoy me. But on occasion I’ve had to take charge of corporate Twitter accounts. And it’s all about staying on-message, getting the tone of voice right and pretending I have a shiny metal exterior. And my head is therefore in a prudish, semi-outraged place. I’m like a teacher patrolling a school corridor during lunch hour. So when someone appears in that Twitter feed and is swearing, or expressing shit political opinions, or posting pictures of porn, I get angry and defensive. “HOW DARE THEY?!” I think. “HOW DARE THEY COME INTO MY SLEEK TWITTER WORLD AND POST THAT CRAP? BAN THIS SICK FILTH!”

Whereas in reality the person tweeting is actually in their own personal space, expressing their own opinions, and I am the voyeur peeking in. Tweeters are not guests invited under sufferance into our space. They are masters of their own domains (this is a terrible phrase/metaphor. I’m tired).

But I also think that the reason Charlie Brooker has received so much abuse is that as a celebrity/journalist, there is the perception that he is here to entertain us on Twitter. That just as we pay our license fee to watch the BBC or pay to buy a newspaper and demand entertainment, so we should be able to follow Charlie or Caitlin Moran or Giles Coren on Twitter and sit back, popcorn in hand and await entertainment. But this isn’t the BBC or The Guardian, it’s Twitter. No-one (well, very few people) is getting paid to tweet. No one here is obliged to entertain you. You are not doing anyone a favour by following them.

I sometimes get the sense that some people view Twitter as civilians and celebrities. If you’re a civilian, you can tweet about picking up your kids from school, or what you had for lunch, or take the piss out of Ed Miliband. Whereas if you’re a celebrity, you’re obliged to entertain, to feed your followers a constant stream of wit and bon mots. Whereas surely the whole point of Twitter is that it can smash down that wall between celebrity and the public. You might work in a bank, or work in e-learning (like me) but you can still be funny (or try to be funny) and gain a respectable following. And you might be a top journalist and you can still tweet about David Cameron being a lizard or what you ate for dinner. If you follow a “civilian” (for example, a man who works in a bank and plays football on a Sunday with Steve and Justin) and he tweets annoying crap about David Cameron, you might unfollow him, but you wouldn’t tweet him to tell he’s a boring twat. Whereas with Charlie Brooker, well, he’s a public figure so as soon as he says something stupid you’re well within your rights to tweet him abuse, right? Because he’s obliged to entertain you.

I suppose my point is that on Twitter we are ALL public figures. We’re equals on Twitter in that unless our accounts are protected, we all theoretically have the same global reach. Everything we write on Twitter, whether we are Rihanna or a girl living above a KFC on Seven Sisters Road, is open to the same level of scrutiny.

Twitter has the power to reshape how we think of private/public figures. Occasionally I get tweets telling me that I am boring, or that my tweets are shit, or that I “ought to get a girlfriend” (I have a girlfriend). And normally I block those people. But once in a while I think: How about instead of blocking them, I follow them? And then, when they tweet about picking up their kids from work, or why they like David Cameron, or what they want for dinner, I can chime in with “That’s boring, mate.” or “You’re a twat. Unfollowed.” Because they are obliged to entertain me, right?

I haven’t benefited hugely from being on Twitter. I’ve made a lot of new friends and rekindled interest in my book, but it hasn’t made me rich or famous. I’ve been sent some free stuff. Sadly not very exciting free stuff. Duracell sent me some free batteries, worth approximately £2 and a nice cook once sent me some chocolate.

However, as I said, I have met lots of interesting people and taken part in some projects that would never have happened before I digitised my entire life and uploaded it onto Twitter so that people could point and stare.

I hadn’t heard of the photographer Chris Floyd, but he was a friend of a friend and got in contact with me. He was doing a project in which he photographed 140 people he followed on Twitter and he wanted to photograph me as part of it. I’d already seen some of the photos and really liked them, and I’m hopelessly vain and self-absorbed so of course I said yes.

I wasn’t sure I was going to like Chris. I’m suspicious of people on Twitter who are journalists or photographers. I tend to assume that whilst I’m a deeply authentic, profoundly sincere person, who spends his time agonising about sex and God, they are all terrible media gadflies, snorting coke in Soho House and stabbing each other in the back. I’m not sure what this fear is based on. Probably not reality.

Anyway, it turned out that Chris was very nice. He has a little studio in Kensal Rise, down the road from a place I used to work 10 years ago. Studio isn’t really the right word: it’s a small cubby hole, crammed full of technology and old photos. We chatted and got on. I suppose the photographers know how to put people at ease; they know how to slip into easy conversation, so that you don’t spend your time biting your nails or shouting at the sun. I was fascinated by the photographic process. As we chatted he took photos, and within a second of the photo being taken, his assistants would be converting it into black and white, lightening certain areas and cleaning bit up. They all seemed to instantly know which photos worked and which didn’t. When I tried to pose, Chris told me off. He was right.

Later, I was joined by my friends Wh1sks and Debsa, and some group shots were taken.

The whole day made me quite excited. I giggled like a schoolgirl. I gawped as I pointed out the other Twitter people who Chris had photographed for the series.

Here are some of the pics:

1) Me, looking moody.

2) Me looking puzzled.

3) Me smiling. It does happen.

4) Me as a crude anti-semitic stereotype.

5) Me and Debsa.

6) A group shot.

I’ve kept in touch with Chris and was pleased to see the final product: a rather beautiful poster of all the 140 people:

I like it for a lot of reasons. Mainly because it means that if I achieve nothing else in life, I am on the same poster as some minor British celebrities. They can’t take that away from me. They can try, but they will fail. I also like playing “Where’s Greggy?” a kind of narcissistic version of Where’s Wally, in which I get people to find me on the poster. Have a go yourself.

The poster is also a useful historical document. If nothing else, it shows that in February 2011, over 90% of the men in London wore a checked shirt.

It’s been nearly a month since I last posted on Twitter and I’ve found the break very enjoyable and surprisingly easy. I thought I would struggle but apart from a couple of bored evenings Twitter hasn’t really crossed my mind. I check every few days for replies in case I’ve been sexually propositioned, but I’m not reading other people’s tweets (not much change there then!)

One of the reasons I wanted a break from Twitter was to regain some of the many hours I lose every day to pointless social media stuff. Twitter is great when you’re stuck in a boring situation (on a bus or in a meeting) but it had gotten to the point where I would wake up at 9am, think to myself: “Oh, I’ll just check Twitter” and still find myself glued to my PC for the rest of the day. And that would be fine if I had a job and was tweeting in the background, but my situation wasn’t like that. It was just a mostly unemployed man writing a series of one-liners to a load of strangers all day, whilst they polited applauded or replied or pointed and jeered. Which isn’t quite how I want to spend my life. It’s all very well killing time if you’re stuck in a 9-5, but when the 9-5 is your life then killing time just means wasting your life. And whilst wasting my life is sorely tempting, I do want something more.

So, what have I been doing with that glorious time I’ve recaptured from Twitter? Some of it has just been wasted on Facebook. Pornography has also picked up some of the slack. I’ve also read more books and watched more films. But mostly I’ve been fairly productive, on a social level, if not always creatively.

One of the oddly compulsive things about Twitter is that you always want more. When you have 5 replies you want 10 replies. When you have 500 followers you want 1000 followers and when you have 9000 followers you want 10,000 followers, as though that is going to make a material difference to the quality of your life. And it occurred to me that rather than desperately trying to get new followers, I should spend more time getting to know the people I’ve befriended over the last year or so. And so that’s what I’ve done. I tend to avoid big Twitter meet-ups because it inevitably means you spend loads of time chatting to people you don’t really know or like and not getting the chance to speak to people who actually interest you. I’ve just been having coffee or lunch or booze with people, talking about shit and seeing where it goes. I absolutely love Twitter but it’s quite nice being a human being for a while.

On the occasions when I do check Twitter, I find it slightly bewildering. When you are tweeting non-stop you don’t recognise how quickly everything happens on Twitter, and what an insular, self-referential bubble it is. If you consider a political issue (wikileaks or student riots) then in the world outside Twitter you have the time to weigh up the pros and cons, change your mind, remain uncommitted and ambivalent. On Twitter (at least within the particular Twitter bubble I’ve inhabited) within 5 hours of something happening, battle lines have been clearly drawn. People have immediate, concrete opinions and villify those who disagree. An “awareness-raising” hashtag is developed. Someone creates a satirical twitter account in the name of one of the main protagonists. An article by Johan Hari or Graham Linehan is endlessly retweeted as though it were the Holy Grail. A Daily Mail article is retweeted as though it were Mein Kampf. A backlash starts in which a few contrary tweeters pick fights. And you start really hating or loathing Twitter people based solely on bursts of propoganda. All of this before 2pm. One of the nicest things about my break has been allowing my brain to gently expand to the point where it can entertain concepts beyond 140 characters, where there is room for a hundred indecisions and a hundred visions and revisions. Where I don’t feel the need to have an object to hate or resent. It feels like stepping off a merry-go-round and finding my bearings. Obviously, after a while it gets boring in the real world because merry-go-rounds are fun.

When I was about 14 or 15 years old I was very unhappy at school. And I hung around a group of friends who weren’t really friends. I assumed they were friends because I saw them every day, but actually they treated me like shit. But it took me years to work out the simple fact that I didn’t have to spend time with them; that I could walk away and hang out with other people who weren’t evil twats. And my recent time of Twitter reminds me of that – not in the sense that anyone on Twitter was treating me badly, but just in the sense that sometimes you forget that you can take a deep breath and walk away; that the world will not crumble if you change friends or stop tweeting for a bit. And of course, whereas I grew to hate the “friends” at school, I really like most of the people I know on Twitter, and I love the sense of endless possibilities that Twitter offers. And yes, I will be back.

But when I return I want to be a little wiser in how I use it. I’m 35, am single, live in a room in a friend’s flat, and have no discernible career. Because I’m quite high-profile on Twitter people assume that I’ve well-connected and have some kind of media career. I don’t. I know almost no-one in the media and my job prospects are no better than they were 10 years ago. I see writers 10 years younger than me getting Guardian columns and sitcom offers – not because they are more or less talented than me, but because they make things happen. Meanwhile, I get by on odd bits of freelance work from the same old sources. But I wake up some mornings terrified that I’m on the scraphead, that whilst my peers have £60,000-a-year jobs, and homes they own, and wives and kids and cars, I haven’t acheived anything of note (aside from publishing a book 5 years ago that made me no money and was mostly ignored). And I suspect that if I want that to change; if I want to make something of my life, to feel that I have some sense of direction and purpose (even if I never make much money) then I can’t just kill the days on Twitter. I can’t just tweet endlessly in the hope that some Hollywood sugar-daddy is going to pluck me from obscurity and shower me with opportunities and riches. I have to make things happen. I’m not really sure how, but thats’ another story.

I haven’t wasted my time off Twitter. Oh no. Never. I’ve sent various emails and also updated my CV. I’m available for work if anyone fancies hiring me to do things. I’m a social media guru. I’m followed on Twitter by Charlie Brooker. That’s got to be worth 5o grand a year.

But I’ve mainly spent time being Greg as opposed to being themanwhofellasleep, which is time well spent. I also met Ricky Villa. I’ll write about that properly some other time.

I may return to Twitter soon. I’ve quite enjoyed my break. It’s odd because yesterday I had a quick peek from behind the curtains and it looked ridiculous. Like a load of grown men dressed as worms having an argument about X Factor. I felt a twinge.